Wilmette, IL
Wilmette, IL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Wilmette at the 23rd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 10,820 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Wilmette at the 27th national percentile — 4 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Wilmette's building exposure, zone by zone
Wilmette rates 97.4% Minimal exposure against just 2.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 10,820 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 10,820 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Wilmette compares
Wilmette's 67th-percentile standing inside Illinois outpaces its 23rd national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Wilmette ranks 24,228 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,464 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 473 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Wilmette's moderate rating (23rd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Wilmette's 97.4% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Wilmette's 23rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Wilmette, see the exposure-zones guide.